


Time, it Took Us to Where the Water Was

by lonewytch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), No Fandom
Genre: Angst, Eleventh Doctor Era, F/M, Love, One Shot, Romance, Time Travel, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:53:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonewytch/pseuds/lonewytch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of the woman the Doctor loves, through his eyes, from Stormcage until her death.  </p><p>Like the storms, their timelines are wrapped and wound round each other, woven intimately, threads of silk cupped into a cocoon. They spiral in onto each other and are impossible to separate now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time, it Took Us to Where the Water Was

_Now that your soul has entered my all-too-present flesh_  
 

His visits are frequent at first. He marks himself onto her nights, pressing himself into the blue-black light of the corridor as he steps from the Tardis, wrapping his hands around the rigid steel bars of her cell. She is an unseen force, a centre of gravity tugging something at the very centre of him, drawing him in like a fundamental law of the universe, certain as physics, and certain as the birth of stars. No matter how far he flings himself out into the dark of space, no matter how far backwards or forwards he moves, he always finds himself looping back to the cold grey of the Stormcage, elliptical.  
 

 _…and made with it a soul in kind_  
 

Every time is different, unique, and he lives it with the clarity of glass, gazing at every moment even as it passes on. Despite his perfect memory there is a need in him to somehow record all the small moments in some way where he can live every sensation, every feeling again. He is wary that one day, far into the future, his memory will prove fallible and he will find these times slipping away from him, receding like water into dry sand.   
 

 _…your each embarking thought,_   _the breathing swing and sway of your movement_    
 

He takes her to visit new planets, the strange, the exotic and the wonderful. He shares the sharp thrill of discovery with her. They hold hands at the Tardis exit, heart lines pressed tight one against the other, and they throw the doors wide open together. They explore the furthest reaches of time and of space and he pushes his expertise, his knowledge of the riches of the universe to its limits. He searches his past for the beautiful and the sublime and he shares it with her. She wants to see the edges of it, she tells him. She wants to go further, she wants them to see things no one has ever seen before and no one ever will. Her avidity for experience is a force of nature which matches his. She has a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge and experience and a fire for him that warms him to the marrow of his bones.  
 

 _…makes an impression on the wax of my surrendering will_  

  
They crash the balls and the dinner parties of the rich and powerful and get uproariously drunk on extravagant champagnes. River lies her way into them, glowing in her evening dress and her high heels, which later she hangs off the railing of the Tardis. Him in his tux, all made up, polished bright like quartz, hair slicked back. Her tongue is silver and smooth and he admires the dexterity with which she disarms even the most suspicious servants. She flicks her hair, smiles over her shoulder at him as they walk in and then their feet pound and slide across the dance floors for hours on end, their bodies locked in spirals, the movement of amber and rose globes above them. And then later they stagger out, their steps an unsteady staccato. They laugh with abandon, grasping fists of each other’s clothing to keep themselves upright, covered in glitter, the champagne bubbles carrying them stumbling back to the Tardis.  
 

 _…my mind is but a pillow_   _indented by the flow of your passing thoughts_  
 

He knows that sometimes she travels alone. Times when he has followed the rushing of his blood from the Tardis doors, only to find her cell vacant, the only movement the refracted light of the stars through the continual rain, rippling on the walls. Times when she is away doing something that she thinks he will disapprove of, and the pang of disappointment hits him deep.  But the times when she can’t hitch, stowaway or otherwise persuade her way to where she needs to go, he gets a call, or a message on the psychic paper. He trails after her and watches her lie through her teeth, cheat the most experienced gamblers, beguile the unbeguilable, steal guns, and relieve numerous museums and collectors of their artefacts. _“Well, sweetie, it’s not really stealing if it didn’t really belong to them in the first place, is it?”_ And he can’t help but admire her, every moment that he watches her. Her light is so bright that he cannot understand how it doesn’t blind him. Her afterimage burns into him and he can see her behind the dark of his eyelids long after she has gone.  
 

 _…my newly-moulded soul is alight with_   _Your pulsing grace_  
 

Many times he has his own agenda and he needs someone for backup. It’s as natural as the ebb and flow of time that it is her he turns to now. His trust in her is absolute, relentless, and it anchors him deep, in a way that frequently astounds him. It brings a wry smile to his mouth when he thinks of the darkness that she began in and where the path of her life is taking her now. She falls in with him, rarely questioning his motives or decisions (well, _hardly_ _ever_.) Their rhythm together is something known and silently acknowledged, they move with a grace that seems ages old, like the movement of planets around each other. She watches his back, she knows when to do what he needs to be done without him even speaking, and she also shoots things a lot – something he knows he shouldn’t like, but he can’t help himself. She frequently lays down her life for his without expectation, without hesitation. He knows that she has no fear of death, that she doesn’t really think much about an afterlife and this cuts at him so that he wants so much to ask her – “if you could live forever after you died – would you?” But he doesn’t ask because he’s scared the answer will be “No.”  
 

 _…your secret deceptions_   _have transformed dead stone to fire._    
 

They save lives together. He watches her with a curious kind of pride, as her quick hands turn levers and fuse wires, as her keen intelligence works things out synchronously with his, as they turn to each other with the same realisations lighting their eyes at the same moment. He watches as she fires with deadly accuracy, as she puts herself in the way of danger despite his protestations - as she is quiet and quick and sure and deadly. She is generous with herself, gambling her life often for the sake of others. And he loves her for that though he knows that one day it will lead into shadows so deep that she will be blotted out completely. She is completely lethal, she was bred and formed and schooled as a bringer of death after all - so she brings death where he will not, where he dare not let himself, and he feels gratitude well in him as she makes the decisions he cannot make.  
 

 _Each new day is a slow beginning_   _new lamentations rise_    
 

Trouble follows them wherever they go – or they seek it out, he is never quite sure which. He loses count of the number of times they run, more often than not one hand in the other, clasped firm as iron, indisputable as rock. Their hearts beat, their blood moves through them in torrents, hot and relentless. They see horrors together, destruction and chaos that the Universe wreaks on itself, they see darkness. They live on the edge of a blade sometimes. More than once they touch death, whisper to it as they hide in black caves crouching on dusty forgotten floors; as they hang from high trees, the sweeping canopy beneath them; as flames blaze and rise around them. But every time it happens, he knows that she will not die, because sure as anything _he_ is death walking next to her. He holds it in his palms, a dark bird, beaks and claws that tear at him inside when he thinks about it. His shadow cast over her life from the very beginning. He wants her to burn bright enough to set that shadow afire.  
 

 _…from the reed of my longing for your lip_    
 

Often though, they will just float in the vortex and construct their own world of warm bodies stretched languorously, shared breath, and a whispered ancient language. She kicks off her shoes and goes barefoot, silent as dust, along the Tardis corridors to their bedroom, towing him behind her, their fingers interlaced. They lie in the mellow light cast by its walls; they mould themselves to the bed and to each other. Sometimes she will be surprisingly soft and yielding under his hands, but sometimes she will burn hot, her blood rising to him. He is endlessly fascinated by the rediscovery of her skin, even though he remembers its scent and taste perfectly but it is a living and breathing landscape that curves and dips and folds, and he is its explorer. He maps it with his fingers and his lips, over and over again, licks, tastes and stores it away in his head, into infinity.  
 

 _…your loving candour strokes the mouth of the reed with a sweet languishing refrain_  
   
   
As the long nights with her pass by he watches her diary fill, page by page by page. Each time he meets her he remembers where she wrote into it last, where her finger marks the different spots as she recounts adventures that catalogue where and when they are together. Its cover begins to fade and becomes the blue of a bruised and weary sky. She holds it in her small, strong hands and flicks the pages and he can sees the edges become scuffed and worn. It cannot resist the passage of time any more than she can. Time pushes against her now like the water that is her name, dripping and trickling its way into her.  
   
   
  _My soul imitates and installs…_    
 

On rare occasions when he sleeps he dreams of an ocean that he cannot hold back, a vast sea that consumes him, his mouth full of salt, his eyes raw as he gasps and his body fills with the cold certainty of the tide. When he wakes the knowledge that the more he sees her, the more he makes her diary fill, is sharp inside him. After that it scrapes and snags at him in the strangest moments. Once when he bends to kiss her and she is blinking up at him, eyes wide, it steals his breath. Once when they are running, hands grasped tight, it makes him miss a step as he remembers the first time they ran hand in hand, away from the shadows.  
 

 _…your moon’s soft milk-light in its chambers._    
 

Often in these later days he puts the Tardis into orbit around the grim prison planet Stormcage is located upon. It’s a desolate little star system, far out on the edge of a galaxy. He sets a circular path around the dull twisting sphere, opens the doors and then stands looking down at the swirling grey of the cloud and the flashing lightning that dapples it while he tries to think. Like the storms, their timelines are wrapped and wound round each other, woven intimately, threads of silk cupped into a cocoon. They spiral in onto each other and are impossible to separate now. He knows that this means, once her time is over, it will be very difficult if not impossible for him to go back to visit her. They are too tangled, too closely woven. He rests his head in his hands, closes his eyes and he can see the bright lines plying around each other tightly.  
 

 _I mould myself to fit your form…_    
 

He visits her less and less as the pages give way to her looping hand. He teases the time out, stretches it thin, he bargains with himself that for each page filled in the diary he will spend so long travelling. In the lonely gaps between, he wanders for a time. His path crosses with others, he meets and saves countless lives, people and beings that he will never see again. He remains anonymous and in the shadows on planets that are likely to know his identity, he salves his endless curiosity. And all the time he gathers information and researches, and all the time she is there like an itch underneath his skin. Sometimes he thinks he can feel her inside him, stretching along the fibre of his muscles, in his stomach, inside his mouth, her golden light all through him. He wonders if, when he regenerates again, it will be different. He wonders if he will always carry her with him.  
 

 _…like a belt for the waist, even when_   _your eye has tethered me with angry scowls_  
 

And when he sees her he returns at a point not much later in her own timeline, and he lies about his age to spare both of them questions that he cannot answer. When he returns after these long and aching trips around the universe, he is always in a fever for her. She always welcomes his fervour eagerly, looking pleased and surprised. As she moves above him, light pours around and frames her, holds her like amber. Her hair tangles with his, gold and chestnut mingled together, her breath in his ear, her skin gentle on his, and his secret burns him up from the inside out and it hurts like ice and fire.  
 

 _…turning me this way and that until_    
 

In the last days he can see the pages of her diary becoming more brittle, they begin to ripple and curl from a lifetime of thumbing the pages, a lifetime of never letting it leave her side. He remembers the day he gave it to her, how brightly blue it was and the ribbon wrapped around it like a bloodline. When she is released from Stormcage the joy in her eyes is mirrored by the grief in his own. He hides it well, though he knows time has almost caught up with her. More than once, he begins to materialise inside the Library. He never has anything in mind, he has no ideas, no plan, he just finds himself punching in the coordinates, tapping them in, in time with the beat of his hearts. But he never allows the Tardis to fully manifest, he just lets her ghost in and then out of the final resting place of his dead wife, witnessed by no one but the shadows.  
 

 _…my distracted heart jumps out of itself._    
 

And in the end the relentless ocean takes her under. She is all verve and excitement as she tells him about the team she has assembled, about a library deserted for a hundred years, sealed tight, all its secrets held close within. Her eyes sparkle with the mystery of it, with the challenge. She tells him she will send him a message to let him know when to meet her there. His throat is full of stones and his mouth cannot form words to speak, because he knows this message well. A message misplaced through time to his younger, more naïve self, the first words he read in her hand, which now fills the pages of the blue diary.  
 A few days later he takes her to listen to the Towers sing. The wind blows through them, divine, euphoric, yet melancholy, every sound and melody you could ever hear all whipped together in a circling song of exquisite beauty. They sit, leaning against each other all through that night. Their bodies are solid and warm and real, their skin passes heat back and forth and it is as if they are conducting life from one to the other, as if their bodies are engaged in an endless dance to and fro. They sit and talk and talk as if they will never run out of things to say and he presses his palm flat against hers, heart lines together, parallel, twinned. The wind shifts the white sands underneath the towers, changing them, reforming them over and over. Laid across the sky are stars so bright and so close he wants to reach out, fill his hands and put them all in her pockets.  
   
**  
 _The poem is by the 13 th Century Sufi mystic, Rumi. _  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   



End file.
